A conversation with Cabiria Lizzi
1. The Cattive blog is a space we have decided to dedicate to exploring the short films in our distribution catalog. Yours, among all, is perhaps the most surrealist. I would like to know more about your artistic background. Tell us also about your inspirations.
Since I was a child, I had the opportunity to experience contemporary art firsthand, wandering through exhibitions, paintings, galleries, performances, and shows thanks to my mother, a critic and curator of art events. I also explored the world of dance extensively, initially at an educational level and later in choreographic-performance. I studied at the Art High School in Udine, starting with hyperrealist drawing and then discovering the boundless universe of photography... but I felt that stillness hid something powerful. Thus, I discovered video, video art, and finally cinema! I started with editing, which revealed to me the possibility of deconstructing, stitching together, and rewriting a story. At that point, I asked myself: why not try to bring this writing process to the previous phase, the embryonic birth of a directorial idea? I believe that surrealism simply stems from the only way I know how to look at the world, or rather, the way I most enjoy looking at it. I love observing reality, every little dialogue exchange, every situation or daily relationship between people, and from this reality extract that seed of magic, surrealism, the fantastic that invades the ordinary and just requires a little attention and an open gaze to manifest.
2. How did the idea for the short film come about?
It was a dark and foggy winter Sunday; I was returning from the sea towards my mountainous lands in Friuli Venezia Giulia. I encountered a striking image: immersed in an almost dystopian landscape, there was a gas station illuminated by a very strong neon light flickering, revealing itself intermittently in the pitch-black night.
Something lit up inside me, and I knew I wanted to tell an image like that: intermittent, mysterious, as fascinating as it is repellent in its revealing and hiding from view.
To this initial visual inspiration, an inner need was added to convey that indefinable feeling of “meh,” of apathy, of malaise that seems to have no objective sources. A necessity derived from observing a widespread discomfort afflicting my peers but destabilizing all ages; a loneliness that is not loneliness, a depression that is not depression, an interference with happiness that is ineffable and reflective of the uncertain world we live in: everything seems possible and nothing achievable. Petro is a collection of human weaknesses I observed in the girl approaching adulthood as well as in the sixty-year-old who has lost his bearings.
3. Watching the film, I had the feeling of having to rely on the flow. It was a bit like surrendering to a guided path, by you in this case, made of images, voices, characters, without necessarily asking too many questions. After the idea comes the writing. I am very curious to know how the writing process of the film went. Was it linear?
Exactly, the aim of the short film is to take the viewer into a rarefied, dreamlike, irrational atmosphere, rather than into a story in its most classical sense.
The skeleton of the short film was quite stable from the beginning, but the writing was a process of instinctive psychological excavation and continuous change. Many elements of PetroL. were discoveries even for me... some of the meanings behind the interpretative layers I only metabolized and understood after the work was completed.
The first draft was very different and longer than the final one. It had more rationality; it was more structured, but then I realized that to convey that “flow” you mentioned, I had to take out some of the cerebral and put in the gut. It’s all a big experiment, starting from the writing, I didn’t want it to have too defined a structure, but rather to be a metaphor for the inexplicable and irrational mechanisms of the protagonist's mind. I wanted the storytelling method itself to be a sort of journey, a pact with the viewer to enter a state of suspension from the earthly world in favor of the mental one.
4. I think darkness is an element in this short film, almost like another character. Darkness surrounds the protagonist, the scenes. It certainly helps in building an atmosphere. What value did you assign to this element?
I greatly appreciate your observation because darkness and its relationship with light were the cornerstone elements for constructing the entire narrative. Darkness is absolutely the binder of the characters and the matrix of the atmosphere. Helping me build this atmosphere was the very idea of imagining the protagonist as a sort of moth groping in the darkness of his own mind, searching for a glimmer, a small light that shows him the way. In the end, the little light appears, and it's a spark that could potentially ignite a violent fire but instead leads Petro towards the first light of dawn.
To support your thesis, if I had to describe the short film in one sentence, I would say it is “a journey into the dark mind of a man in search of light.”
5. PetroL. has a truly important layering of meanings, but I thought the writing on the homeless man's cardboard sign could somehow synthesize them all: "I wanted to live elsewhere and ended up on the ground." A bit fatalistic, perhaps. For this reason, I wanted to ask you: I had the feeling that your characters cannot choose, that they are inside a system of things that decides for them. Where is free will, the possibility of choice, for you, for the characters in this story?
I believe the phrase on the homeless man's cardboard is indeed an excellent summary of what the situations and characters in the short film show. I also wanted to talk about free will, about the impotence in the face of certain conditions that, whether we like it or not, crush and constrain us. I often observe social environments, economic situations, mental impositions that clip the wings of powerless people who often don't even allow themselves the chance to try to change the state of things. I think that sometimes the possibility of choosing is a mere privilege, suffocated by impositions that often do not depend on us, but are the result of many social distortions that lead us to the illusion of free will...
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